Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday January 29, 2008 @04:09PM
from the do-not-fiddle-my-bits dept.

Not Comcastic writes "Two weeks after officially opening proceedings on Comcast's BitTorrent throttling, angry users are bombarding the FCC with comments critical of the cable provider's practices. 'On numerous occasions, my access to legal BitTorrent files was cut off by Comcast,' a systems administrator based in Indianapolis wrote to the FCC shortly after the proceeding began. 'During this period, I managed to troubleshoot all other possible causes of this issue, and it was my conclusion (speaking as a competent IT administrator) that this could only be occurring due to direct action at the ISP (Comcast) level.' Another commenter writes 'I have experienced this throttling of bandwidth in sharing open-source software, e.g. Knoppix and Open Office. Also I see considerable differences in speed ftp sessions vs. html. They are obviously limiting speed in ftp as well.'"

FiOS is available in some areas now. It got put in my old neighborhood right before I moved, so sad. My friend has it though and he claims it's faster than cable. I don't have any numbers but, what the heck even if it's just a little slower, anything's better than comcast...

Why would you assume it was slower than cable? Until cable rolls with Docsis 3.0 fios will completely own it. Hell fios owns my ASDL 2+ connection in the upstream, though it's comparable to my downstream. Beats the hell out of anything I could get through cable without paying for business class.

You it's really bad when you have to flee TO Verizon. Trust me, these people are horribly incompetent and have horrible customer service. Nevermind that their various departments just cannot talk to each other. If you have phone service and Internet through them good luck getting either taken care of even though they are on the same damn bill. Still moving to Verizon might actually be the only option left (shudders).

They rolled over for the NSA. They fought when it was convenient for them. Being inconsistent means nothing.

Oh, but it does. If you're worried about the NSA, you're... well, stuffed, really. Encrypt everything you can, and check for hardware keyloggers on the cable every morning before you log on.

Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything. We're doing nothing to attract their attention. But we are worried about the MAFIAA, because a lot of us are... well, we are doing things to attract their attention. Gigabytes of things. Daily. An ISP that will stand up for its customers against those guys is golden.

Most of us, in practice, aren't worried about the NSA other than in the abstract. We're not organising political protests or anything.

The mere fact that you can state you "aren't worried about the NSA" and in the same paragraph say "we're not organizing political protests or anything" is pretty depressing. And I don't know which part is worse -- thinking that you might actually have a reason to fear the NSA because of political protects (First Amendment, what??) or me being cynical enough to understand why you would draw that conclusion.

Absolutely! One thing we're missing in today's society that we seem to admire most is integrity and courage to do what is right and lawful even [especially] under threat of retaliation! We've heard of many journalists being put in jail for not violating their ethics and principles. Many people find that extremely courageous while others think it's stupid. That's part of the difference in long-term thinking versus short-term and it has become our national bad-habit to go for the short-term gains and giving up our long-earned legacy.

"let's compare national security, and rolling over to a government agency, as required by law"

The phone companies didn't have to turn over anything "as required by law". The government made a request, and all the others gave them what they wanted when it WASN'T required by law. It wasn't a legal demand, because the government didn't have the legal right. Qwest basically said "show us the warrant and you can have any of the information it specifies". Seeing there never was any warrants, nothing was turned over by Qwest.

Actually, they were required by law to tell the NSA to go fuck themselves and get a FISA warrant. I mean, FISA is a rubberstamp secret court, but at least it keeps a trail and is there to prevent exactly the same sort of dragnet that they installed in the first place.

Is it really a Democrat or Republican thing whether the word of the Executive is law? Last I looked, martial law was not in effect.

They typically convert your copper POTS line to a fiber based one. From the point of view of your telephone service, there is no difference. You can't have DSL over it though. You can however request that they leave your copper phone line alone if you desire DSL from an CLEC. There is no sunset date for existing Verizon copper but one day eventually Verizon wants will turn off all copper and at that point you will be SOL.

Your phone service travels over fiber instead of copper. Isn't that better? The FIOS line can carry multiple phone lines so say good-bye to the old copper lines.

Also, from what I'm guessing, it you don't like your ISP providing the FIOS connection, you cannot get another ISP that can use that FIOS connection.
IOW: you are just locking yourself into another monopoly.

And, that's they way all ISPs want it. Verizon is trying to have Massachusetts remove the need to get permission from each city and town and instead, go through one state agency for authorization to carry television signals. What do ya think - will the citizens of MA have any leverage once that goes through?

My cellphone acts like a modem--I've used it like one in the past where I needed to fax something for some reason or another. That is the only time I could have used a POTS line. But now I hear that you can fax through your VOIP if they have it set up correctly.

If there is a power outage, I just light some candles and sit tight.

Please enlighten me on what other uses a POTS line has, if I have a cellphone and the Internet.

I know someone with FiOS, and the equipment they installed in his basement is impressive, as in, looks so expensive I'm impressed they don't charge for it. They installed a huge switchboard cabinet, with a backup battery and some sort of conversion electronics to feed into standard coax TV cables and Ethernet.

Also, from what I'm guessing, it you don't like your ISP providing the FIOS connection, you cannot get another ISP that can use that FIOS connection.

IOW: you are just locking yourself into another monopoly.

One of my friends use to work for Cox Cable, and they'd get calls after Verizon would turn on FIOS at a site due to Verizon cutting all of the copper cables - including Cox's coax - when they installed it. Not sure if they did it also when they ran FIOS past a house or not, but they were not being ethical in their practices on its roll-out at least at one stage.

I think the only real escape from our land-line monopolists might be for wide-area high-speed wireless routers with automatic meshing capabilities in the consumer's cost range to be developed. There are problems with this of course, and a 100% switchover is unlikely, but if it can make competition then it might help everyone.

I want to - if only for the bandwidth improvements both up and down.Unfortunately where I am it seems that Verizon FiOS is filtering out port 80 - Comcast (my current provider) is not. This is something of a deal-breaker - and leaves me baffled... why is Verizon offering me 15up/15down service and then telling me "absolutely no servers"? What on earth is that upstream bandwidth for? No commercial servers, ok. No unreasonable use of the upstream pipe at full capacity 24/7, ok. Telling me I can't run my

I vaguely recall reading something a while back about using 802.11 routers in order to create a wireless internet, and routing traffic wirelessly from one to another to go from places where no broadband is available to places where it was.

Perhaps it's about time to get some real ethernet going over a large area.

Thanks to the 100M cable limit, Ethernet can't be used easily for that without going to fiber optic or something else... so much for the easy cost.

A couple points:

1. The 100 meter cable distance limitation is for 10/100/1000Base-T, not Ethernet. For example, 10GBASE-LR is capable of transmitting Ethernet at distances of up to 10 kilometers over single mode fiber.

2. Metro wireless networks don't need to use a wired network for back haul, and typically don't. For example, endpoints could connect to the access points using 802.11b/g, and then the access points could mesh with one another using 802.11a/n. At some point there would be wired connections, b

there is a solution - have the government force comcast to give 3rd parties access to their lines, for a rental fee. this will no doubt have in the same position we in australia have though, a company desperately trying to hang onto it's monopoly, though it has had limited success after many court battles.

Unfortunately don't think that will happen. The attempt to get cable to open their lines was already made a few years ago http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/166228 [slashdot.org]. The loss and ruling in that case was ultimately the decision the bells used to be able to lock 3rd parties out of their next-gen technologies such as FiOS by getting them classified as Information Services as well instead of the traditional Telecommunications Service.

I'm not calling you a liar, just asking if you've actually made sure that they are your only high speed option. I've had people here tell me that the cable company is the only option, and I know for a fact that is false, it is just that they haven't done any research.The alternative would likely be some kind of DSL, but there are lots of different people to deliver that. First check to see if you local phone company does it. If they do, you can probably get another local ISP. Our local telco offers DSL, but

Comcast's forgery of packets, which was applied without regard to system utilization,was targeted to specific applications, wasn't disclosed, and altered customer communications, isn't acceptable under any circumstance.

If an internet service provider restricts bandwidth, even during peak usage, to specific applications or even to usage in general, in such a way that a consumer's bandwidth falls below FCC's definition of broadband, then the provider's service offering can no longer be considered broadband.

For example, my local cable ISP has marked ALL encrypted traffic as having a lower priority over non-encrypted content in their "war on P2P filesharing" (this means, amongst other obvious drawbacks, downgraded performance using ssh and sftp) reference [michaelgeist.ca]. I am not sure on the specifics or legality of this kind of "filtering" but it would seem that nobody has made such a big fuss yet up here. Their practice is grey-zone at best I would think and it will be interesting to see what happens with the issue.

That's curious. How are they defining 'encrypted'? Particular known ports? Content that clearly isn't to a "known port that isn't encrypted"? I can imagine that the former is relatively easy to bypass (nonstandard ports, port redirectors, etc), and the latter being a major issue for gaming of any description...Does this apply to HTTP over SSL connections?Of course, they simply cannot tell the difference between HTTP over SSL and... well, anything else over "SSL"...And, of course, one could just run, say, bi

My understanding is that they have a signature for the SSL handshake and use that. They could actually do quite well with that strategy if they make the first 50-100kb go fast and then drop the priority after that -- it makes most HTTPS transfers have no noticeable change in speed, but would dramatically slow down anything trying to do bulk data transfer.

Hmm if they're giving encrypted traffic a lower priority, that means that they are encouraging people to use http over https to connect to their bank, webmail and other online accounts that are usually encrypted to protect personal information. I can see a LOT of companies being upset with this (including Royal Bank, ScotiaBank, CIBC, HSBC, TD, etc.).

This might be a little off-topic, but the common wisdom is that Comcast and other cable companies have monopolies on providing high-speed internet access in many areas. I realize they have competition from DirectTV (Satellite TV) and Broadcast Television for providing varying quality in Cable/TV entertainment, and that there is up-and-coming competition from Verizon to provide high-speed internet.

Is there any way to extend the "Public Broadcast TV" metaphor into the internet space? I could live with whatever downstream connection is required to watch YouTube videos... and upload streams that would pale in comparison to anybody running P2P services. Seriously, though, "light" internet users like me to subsidizing it for everybody else.

As for as throttling, Comcast is behaving unethically by stopping legitimate uses of P2P networks (sharing F/OSS distributions) and they should be heavily fined (I'm going to pull a RIAA-style gross sum of money from my ass), how about $500,000 per unethical P2P blockage? So divide the number of FCC complains in half, and then add the words "Millions" after it, and hand Comcast the bill.

Is there any way to extend the "Public Broadcast TV" metaphor into the internet space?

Well, there is a way to extend the "public infrastructure" metaphor into Internet service. UTOPIA [utopianet.org] is (what looks to be) an awesome project that's been rolled out in Utah. It's a fiber-to-the-premises network. The fiber is publicly owned, over which providers then sell services (Internet, phone, etc).

To me this looks like an absolutely genius plan. Service providers get free infrastructure (i.e. a bigger market to sell

Although FCC comments are all well and good, talking to Comcast's CSR (customer service reps) will have more impact. If every balky P2P connection results in a $5-$10 in call-center time, then Comcast will think differently about it's filtering policy.

The key to solving this is to make unfettered P2P connections the least cost option for Comcast. That means increasing the costs of not providing those connections. FCC fines might do it (assuming the FCC acts), but high customer service cost certainly will.

You are making a silly assumption here. You seem to think that customer support costs are variable. Instead for a slimy company like Comcast they are fixed. As more calls come in they will not hire any more workers or add any more hours to CSR's schedules. The hold times will just go up which will result in crappy customer service for everybody. People can't actually leave Comcast because most people don't have another option. Therefore Comcast has no incentive to provide good customer service.

I wouldn't call it silly. Calling Comcast and complaining can have effects, both for you as an individual, and for everyone in the long run. You need to come back out of the conspiracy cave, and realize that the bandwidth limiting decisions are probably being made higher up the management chain, while the day-to-day call center work is being made at the supervisor or maybe manager level at best. If you keep calling in every day complaining, eventually some call center manager is going to get annoyed that yo

Throttling is IMHO only a problem when the customer doesn't know about it.

I have specifically chosen an ISP who promise they don't use any kind of throttling. On the other hand I did'nt go with the cheapest ISP I could find. My ISP has a "true flatrate" policy. No maximum usage and no throttling. The price is accordingly a little higher.

Most of my family does not use P2P in any way, and rarely download anything at all. For them, a low price is more important. And lets face it: this kind of bandwidth throttling was only invented because 5% of the customers consume 90% of the ISPs backbone resources. If this wasn't an issue, nobody would have invented the damn thing.

I don't think throttling should be illegal. It should only be illegal to use throttling and not tell customers about it. Throttling keeps the price down for ISPs, and they should be perfectly allowed to implemented - as long as all their customers are aware of it. In that way, if you don't want an ISP/product with throttling you can simply choose another ISP/product.

Bandwidth costs money. Free competition dictates that all ISPs will be seeking ways to lower their costs and in that way offer the consumers lower prices. This is a good thing, as long as customers know what they are buying.

Therefore: Allow throttling, but force ISPs to clearly state which products are subject to throttling. In that way, customers can buy the product they find suitable for their needs, and the "heavy users" can pay a higher price for their actual usage.

It is no different than your (cell)phone bill: if you call people 24/7, of if you buy a true flatrate product, it will cost more than just calling your mom for 5 minutes twice a month. Just as it should.

Also, the way in which it is done makes a big difference.If Comcast were dropping the priority of packets suspected to be BitTorrent so that BT sessions slowed down during peak periods in favor of more "interactive" traffic, it wouldn't be so bad.

The problem is that they're not really throttling - they are actively killing connections by injecting bogus RST packets, regardless of time of day. (Despite their claims that traffic is only "delayed" at "peak times", which would be understandable and fine with m

I have specifically chosen an ISP who promise they don't use any kind of throttling. On the other hand I did'nt go with the cheapest ISP I could find. My ISP has a "true flatrate" policy. No maximum usage and no throttling. The price is accordingly a little higher.

I did too, this time, because I had the ability to do so (I live in an area where we have a choice between Frontier DSL lines and Charter cable) and was pretty much forced because Charter blocks ports here so I couldn't run my website, host DNS an

I am not serviced by comcast but by NTC communications in blacksburg, va. the worst thing here is that if I try to use bit torrent or some other p2p application, all my web traffic is stopped (yes STOPPED) as long as I let p2p application run. Then, when I close bit torrent, it take few minutes for normal web access to resume. this is really frustrating. I usually VPN to my school and access every thing from there then.

I heard people were serviced by Comcast before and thought nothing of it. Then I was out in the country with a friend who owns a farm. He was waiting for a new bull to come to his farm. I asked what he would do with the bull and he said that the bull was coming to service his cows. I hope you're as enlightened as I am.

Actually, that's more likely you simply saturating your upstream without any QoS. If ACKs for downstream data can't get out in a timely fashion, downstream TCP sessions (web pages) will slow to a crawl. Cable modems are notorious for having very large buffers, so that if the upstream bandwidth gets saturated, latency shoots through the roof.Either:1) Set up QoS on your router so outgoing ACKs always have priority, and possibly BT has lower priority than all other traffic (Note, this is what Comcast SHOU

I occasionally consult for a wireless ISP, and we've become friends.
In order for him to avoid ppl saturating his network, he's implemented a burst feature. Shaw (here in Alberta, anyway) has something similar.
So a constant stream might yield15 kb/s, whereas web surfing seems fast. That's because the network will burst (in Shaw's case) up to 25 MB/s. Let that baby stream though, regardless if it's FTP,.torrent, HTTP, and it'll slow down to 50 kb/s or so.
I seriously doubt Comcast (although I don't know anything about them) is identifying and throttling any particular protocol or P2P stream...they've just done what Shaw, and my friend has; I'd bet.

In a lot of areas they are the only cable provider, so they have a virtual lock on the local market. ( yes, i can go DSL for network and dish for TV, but its a different medium so it doesn't count )

I was one of lucky ones, but it seems they recently flexed their muscles and bought ( forced ) out my local cable company. So now i get to share in the pain of trying to use the service that i paid for with legal uses.

I recently tried to FTP upload a home movie to my web site so my family could download it. I noticed my FTP speeds were incredibly slow - slower than dial-up speeds and I have a 6MB/384K cable connection.

open your eyes, everything uses torrents these days, game demo's/patches for everything and they are as big as a gig each.

Yep, World of Warcraft, one of the most popular games in the world uses a customized bittorrent client to distribute patches. Most distros, and often creative commons or public domain videos are also distributed via bittorrent. On occasion I've even see new movie trailers being distributed with bittorrent, although admittedly that's pretty rare considering the MPAAs rocky relations with P2P.

I don't play WoW, so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that it uses Torrents for updates and patching. GP is pretty naive to assume that just because you've had to use a torrent it means you're a big pirate. It's a legitimate way of moving huge files around the 'net. That's like saying all truck drivers are smugglers just because a few people use semi-trucks to smuggle drugs into the country.

Yes, WoW does use Bittorrent for it's updates. I'd be rather unhappy if it were to be further restricted.

I was quoted in the Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] article. Here is the text of my FCC comment.

Dear Commissioners,

As a longtime customer of the Comcast Corporation (CMCSA) I feel it is necessary for me to provide you with my views and opinions regarding their use of throttling bandwidth for point to point (P2P) users that access their network.

Well with the Warcraft updates, Blizz DOES have a server which you can download from. If you are behind a firewall the blizz client will sometimes connect to their own server to download the content from, it's just slow as hell. The nice thing is that with the supposed 10mil customers they now have, it makes it a lot quicker to get EVERYBODY patched then it would be if everybody was having to connect to the same choke-point to download the latest 300meg patch to be able to connect to the server.

Is parent post AC because he's astroturfing for Comcast?Read the item - one user claims proof that Comcast is throttling ftp as well. I suppose ftp "illegal" in your view as well then? Comcast is throttling bandwidth intensive traffic without regard to the legality of the content. This is wrong.

Comcast thought they could get away with advertising unlimited broadband service but only actually providing limted service. It is this deception of customers that brought on this investigation, not the content trave

I've got mod points, and I was going to moderate in this thread, and then I saw this and needed to reply.

I've got Comcast at home, and lately anything over:80/tcp has been horrendous. Most pages take a good 10-30 seconds to connect to the server, and never mind the number of pictures that can be on some sites.

I grabbed my laptop, hit the OpenVPN button to my server in a datacenter in Atlanta, and surprise! The pages loaded instantly.

Between P2P throttling and general crappy service, I sincerely hope that this suit changes things for the better.

Just a note (perhaps you know this, but others may not), but the reason VPN works and SSH tunnels don't is because Sandvine targets long-lived TCP connections. By default, OpenVPN tunnels over UDP; the control messages for session handling is done by OpenVPN and is unreadable by intermediaries. With SSH tunnels, they can't read your data, but they can forge TCP control messages, which isn't encrypted.

Ironically, Comcast may be really hurting themselves in the long run; if it gets bad enough, P2P software writers will switch to UDP, and manually do the in-order/reliable delivery stuff themselves. TCP has a lot of fancy congestion control, and I doubt that the P2P writers will bother with it...

I'm on Comcast, and I upload pictures to my photography website via SCP. The uploads get throttled after the first couple of MB.
Encryption makes no difference to what they're doing. They don't need to know what's in the packets to decide whether or not to throttle them -- they can make that decision based on what's in the header.

While I'm not a pro-comcast person or anything, what you're seeing is disclosed - it's the 'powerBoost' feature which gives you a bucket of really fast bits up/down stream, after which you throttle down to the speed you've purchased (8/1 or 6/384k or whatever).

So, I can get like 3mbit upstream for a bit, but then it scales back to 1mbit/sec. If I stop the transfer and wait a bit, then start again, I'll get the fast speed again for a little bit. Same is true on downstream - I'll get ~24mbit/sec down for a bit, then it'll throttle back to the 8mbit I pay for.

.. but seriously? Bittorrent is a horrendous resource hog. I'm/glad/ comcast is throttling it, because a significant number of paying customers don't want to watch their connectivity slow to a crawl

So, you prefer them watching their connectivity slow to a crawl because of the hundreds of thousands of YOUTUBE users. Oh guess what. If you have a favorite youtube video, there's no easy way to download it. You need to re-download it again and again and again.